The rise of the Nazi concentration camps, explains Agamben, is not a result of ordinary law or even of penitentiary law, its origin lies in the state of exception and martial law, which in the case of the Nazi lager goes back to the Schutzhaft or “protective custody,” a Prussian juridical institution that allowed for certain individuals to be placed under preventive custody, without any intervention by any judicial authority, if they were considered to be a danger to the security of the state. It follows that the camp always takes place outside of ordinary and criminal law, on a genuine threshold between legality and illegality, which has been slowly imposing itself on the entire planet during the last century. Seen in this light, it is not at all strange that Rudolf Diels, director of the Gestapo before the SS took over the institution in 1934, declared that: “Neither an order nor an instruction exists at the origin of the camps: they were not instituted; one day they were there.”¹. The efficiency for the establishment and set up of the ghettoes and concentration camps we mentioned in (7.23), is closely related to this circumstance.

The threshold situation that characterizes the camp has led Agamben to argue that it is “the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule.”² For this reason, he extends the definition of the camp to any structure where a state of exception takes place, regardless of what type of crimes occur at its specific locus. Thus, Agamben tells us,

The soccer stadium in Bari in which the Italian police temporarily herded Albanian illegal immigrants in 1991 before sending them back to their country, the cycle-racing track in which the Vichy authorities rounded up the Jews before handing them over to the Germans, the refugee camp near the Spanish border where Antonio Machado died in 1939, as well as the zones d’attente in French international airports in which foreigners requesting refugee status are detained will all have to be considered camps. In all these cases, an apparently anodyne place³ (such as the Hotel Arcade near the Paris airport) delimits instead a space in which, for all intents and purposes, the normal rule of law is suspended…⁴

In a broader sense of the term exception, it should be noted that while the black ghettos of the United States were not supposed to occur because racial zoning was unconstitutional, it was the use of a loophole of sorts (the restrictive covenants, 7.13, 7.15), which allowed the establishment of a situation of exception that led to its appearance in the periphery of most American cities. The black ghetto, as well as the favela, the slum, the reservation and the tolerance zone are the result of informal policies of exception inherent to the very structure of the polis, understood here as the materialization of human domination (domus), under the topology of the hunting park (7.11).

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1. Quoted by Agamben in Homo Sacer, 96. ↩︎
2. Agamben, Means Without End, 38. ↩︎
3. As we will see in the remaining chapters, the places of exception where the camp/paradeisos structure is embodied not only appear to be anodyne, they are also quite unexpected. ↩︎
4. Agamben, Means Without End, 40. ↩︎